The essential season

Isn't it time?  Isn't it time for winter to finally end and for spring to come into being? So many people have had a tough time of it this year -- even here on the wet coast, where we can scarcely complain when distant friends have endured one "historic snowstorm" after another. At The Yellow House, even frosty porch steps or a 2" snowfall present problems, and in the usually mild islands of the Strait of Georgia, my friend L and her husband have had a gruelling time -- uprooting from one cherished home and facing big bumps in the road (now beginning to smoothe) on the way to the next.

My earliest springs -- into young adulthood -- were spent in the magic realm of Eastern and Midwestern deciduous trees where, when spring finally pops after a frigid snowy winter, it POPS. It's the stuff that poems are made of, and it happens that my two earliest favorite poets (both New Englanders) each have their own take on the season -- each in a different key.

Robert Frost's perfect mini-poem (one of those stored in my memory) reflects on the transitory:

Nature's first green is gold,
her hardest hue to hold.
Her early leaf's a flower,
but only so an hour.
Then leaf subsides to leaf.
So Eden sank to grief.
So dawn goes down to day.
Nothing gold can stay.
(-Robert Frost, "Nothing Gold Can Stay")

e e cummings' poem celebrates the ecstatic. Still in my memory bank decades after I discovered the poem, its first stanza would recur to me often when spring finally popped among the deciduous cottonwoods and red alders at our cabin property:

i thank You God for most this amazing
day: for the leaping greenly spirits of trees
and a blue true dream of sky; and for everything
which is natural which is infinite which is yes
(- e e cummings, "I Thank You God for most this amazing day")

I came late in life to the perfect poet Pablo Neruda. Regrettably -- and with apologies to my dear friends A and K who both, in different worlds, know and love Spanish -- I can read Neruda only in English. I first discovered him many years ago when I read Jon Kabat-Zinn's book FULL CATASTROPHE LIVING (worth a read!) which closed with a poem that begins:

Now let us count to twelve,
and we will all keep still.
For once on the face of the earth,
let's not speak in any language.
Let's stop for a moment
and not wave our arms so much.
(-Pablo Neruda, "Keeping Still")

Ever (or almost always) respectful of copyright, I've just nibbled
here at these poems. But the great paean to spring, Neruda's
"Deslumbra el dia" or "Dazzle of Day" must be consumed whole:

Enough now of the wet eyes of winter!
Not another single tear.
Hour by hour now, green is beginning,
the essential season,
leaf by leaf,
until in spring's name, we are summoned
to take part in joy.

How wonderful its eternal all-ness.
New air, the promise of flower,
the full moon leaving
its calling card in the foliage,
men and women trailing back from the beach,
with a wet basket of shifting silver.

Like love, like a medal,
I take in,
take in
south, north, violins,
dogs,
lemons, clay,
newly liberated air.

I take in machines smelling of mystery,
my storm-coloured shopping,
everything I need:
orange blossom, string,
grapes like topaz,
the smell of waves.
I gather up,
endlessly,
painlessly,
I breathe.

I dry my clothes in the wind,
and my open heart.
The sky falls and falls.
From my glass,
I drink pure joy.
(-Pablo Neruda, "Dazzle of Day")

I've done some reading about Neruda, and he strikes me as a great humanist. He came from a modest family in the Araucania region on Chile's northerly coast, a region even wetter than Vancouver -- thus "the wet eyes of winter." His literary gifts eventually took him to sophisticated intellectual and consular circles in Europe and then full circle home to Chile, as a trusted colleague of Salvador Allende.

The story is told that when Neruda campaigned for elected office in the most deprived area of the country, the harsh deserts of the north, the miners poured out of the earth to meet his train, chanting his poems and calling, "Neruda! Neruda!"  I learned also that this complex and sensitive man gathered an immense seashell collection -- and this, along with the lemons that appear often in his poems, inspired my 2002 painting, "Appreciation - For Pablo Neruda." (This is one of those Early Works that tells me that I am  making some progress)

Right now, we look out our front window to see nest-building crows snapping long twigs from the neighbouring trees. In and out of the massive clematis vine on our front porch, the pretty little house finches are bringing smaller bits of construction material to renovate two old nests and, we're sure, build some new ones.

So many good things are happening now in the lives of friends. Glasses raised?  Let's drink that glass of pure joy! It IS time.

Math anxiety: Additive and subtractive colours

Math was never my strong suit. I went as far as an elective pre-Grade 12 summer school course in Advanced Algebra, taken solely because two of my active crushes were math brains who thought it would be fun. When I heard the term "imaginary numbers," I was hopeful these would be something you could dress in costumes and write your own scripts for. When this turned out not to be so, my eyes glazed over.

Fast forward to my art studies and my current year's goals. At this stage in my self-study -- after ten years, I sometimes pretend I'm working on my "home-grown MFA" -- I decided I should complement my learn-by-doing approach with some formal knowledge. One area for study has been colour theory, and I started off by replicating the familiar colour wheel.

Almost everyone is at least vaguely familiar with this concept and the primary colours red, yellow and blue that combined in pairs make orange, green and purple. But that's only the half of it. Or the third, really. This is something I learned, with math-induced knots in my stomach, as I bumped into additive and subtractive colours. Huh?

In addition to the colour wheel system of artist's pigments, there's a system describing the interaction of coloured lights, such as stage lighting -- colours that are called "additive." There's also the world of transparent dyes, such as those used in printing and photographic processing -- a group of colours called "subtractive" -- or in my own terminology, Subtractive One. The colours and colour relationships in these alternate universes are, at first glance, so bizarre that I decided I needed some "pneumonic devices" (as someone I once worked with would have said) to help me get a fix on them. Then I had so much fun with this project I decided to share it.

Abacus ready?

The terms "additive" and "subtractive" in themselves make little sense to me, even after they're defined. To remember that additive colours = coloured light, I hold in mind an ad (get it?) for a theatre performance:

Now follow closely: With coloured light, the primary colours are red, green and blue-violet. Once you've accepted this (it took me several weeks), consider that each pair will produce one of the secondary colours: yellow, magenta, or cyan (a zesty turquoise tone). Red and green combine to make yellow. Red and blue-violet combine to make magenta. Green and blue-violet combine to make cyan. I know. Mind-boggling.

So here's my nifty pneumonic cheat sheet, with small fruit icons (sorry about the cyan-coloured lime -- closest I could come -- and as for the relationship between fruit and theatre performances.....?) for the colours, their relationships, and the stunning information that, when combined, these colours produce "white light" ...since all colours are reflected and none absorbed by the surface they're directed to.

On to Subtractive One, as I call it:-- The transparent dyes of print processing consist of the primary colours magenta, cyan and yellow, and the secondary colours red, blue, green. Magenta and cyan combined produce blue. Magenta and yellow combined make red. Cyan and yellow combined make green. Tricky, eh? Take a deep breath and browse through my colourful cheat sheet of "open book" icons and note the punch line: When combined, these colours produce black ...since all colours are absorbed and none are reflected.

Just think: You are now empowered to make a little sense of the small coloured test swatches that you'll find somewhere on virtually any printed packaging or publication.

Full circle now -- back to the original colour wheel and artist's pigments. These colours are also subtractive (aka Subtractive Two), since theoretically all the colours combined, as with Subtractive One, make black -- and for the same reason that all colours are absorbed and none reflected. This is the familiar territory of oft-quoted but rarely accurate maxims such as "Blue and yellow make green." The thing is that artist's pigments are mostly opaque so they don't behave like Subtractive One. And a "green" colour can be produced from various different "blue" and "yellow" colours because different chemicals can produce similar colours. In practice, blue and yellow are as likely to make mud as to make green -- one reason why there are literally hundreds of manufactured artist's pigments from dozens of manufacturers.

Here's a riff on the typical colour wheel, produced with all the tube colours I have on hand.

It's really rather absorbing, to the likes of me anyway. But without all this technicality, let's consider colour another way, as expressed by the artist Wolf Kahn. His paintings seem to have almost all the same subject -- the vertical tree trunks of a dense wood -- but each varies with his astonishing colour choices. He says:

(Because one)..."is more alert to the possibilities of color, all sorts of other possibilities go along with that:-- the possibilities of greater affection for all things, greater tenderness toward the world at large, greater generosity in life generally....If you are an artist in any kind of way, what you are really driving toward is to become a deeper person." -Artist Wolf Kahn

And a further note about something that's made my life more colourful: As it happens, I snagged a math brain after all. Little did I know 43 years ago that the love of my life would find it a pleasant recreation to get out pencil and paper and work on quadratic equations.

Inspired by the blue and white girls

You've read here before about my favourite blog:-- you know the one and it's getting better every week. I read it for a regular injection of my childhood friend's wit, creativity and down-to-earth take on life, as much as for the fascinations of her magic kitchen realm, which I travel via her experiences. She began a memorable post with the words, "My mother-in-law was a blue and white girl. I am, too." Accompanying the text was a photo of enchanting blue and white baking dishes and such (some inherited from her mother-in-law) against the blue and white tiles of her kitchen wall. To my ears only, it called out "Paint me!"

I'm a blue and white girl, too, and over the years my eye has been captured by all kinds of blue and white objects that might work in a still life. So why not now? I rummaged in my stash and found way too many bits and pieces for just one painting. Okay. Following my favourite painter/writer's advice to "constantly set yourself challenges," I decided I'd do a triptych -- an integrated work comprised of three parts, the "Blue and White Series." What's more, I'd work as large as I could with each of the three separate paintings the size of my art paper -- about 20" x 26" in finished format -- for a triptych total width of five feet.

After much fiddling, I arranged my set-up for "Fishing with the Blue and White Girls." A day later, the bowl would acquire some hard-necked garlic.   And those are beautiful weathered seedpods of Chinese Lanterns, which will stand in for their previous orange incarnations in the painting.

Uh-oh. With this set-up in the corner of my six-foot worktable (the main scene of action in my small 10x10 foot studio), there wasn't room for my easel -- !! A big year-end overhaul was obviously required to select and reposition the tabletop essentials. And lucky me! Coming along at precisely the right moment to see me through this project was a far-off friend's lovely gift of two hand-thrown pottery jugs, along with the potter's recommendation that they'd make great brush holders.

Here's the new worktable set-up (and the easel at an angle at which it would never be used!):

And in a starring role, at right stage centre back (?), are the two charming jugs -- one labelled STUFF  and the other TIME  -- "Just what you need," my gift-giving friend said.

Okay. We're ready for lift-off. This is the painting I described in my previous post, in which I began to work consciously on the idea of "painterly" vs. "linear."  Despite the fact that the composition is filled with anchoring lines, you can see from its evolution  how I tried to work with a broader brush. Here's the final outcome:

It's interesting -- to me, at least -- to compare this first painting of 2014 with one I finished in February 2007 -- exactly seven years ago, featuring that same irresistible cat-and-fish teapot and a similar colour inspiration. It's called "White Cats and Rumi Blue" -- gathering all the little gift cats (white ones, at least) I've ever been given and a particular shade of blue that led to my bonding with a cherished work-buddy as we discovered we both loved cats and a particular shade of not-quite-navy blue.

Whether my latest painting is painterly or linear, can we agree that I've made some progress? And who knows where the three-part series and the challenges I've set myself will take me?

As for the Blue and White Girls at the top of this post, they're no one in particular (except some magazine models). I was working on some colour studies with "chips" of colour cut from magazines and couldn't resist seeing what I could do with patterns clipped from the past year's LL Bean catalogs. Some Blue and White Girls just never grow up.

Stepping out of line

I've always loved to draw -- no wonder I still find it absorbing to do even elementary drawing exercises like the one above. This one, drawn "blind" (looking at the subject but not looking down at the drawing in progress) from a newspaper photo of two chefs smilingly showing off their creations, was proposed by a painter/teacher as a useful warm-up for painting. Its focus is obviously not on exactitude, but on "losing the edges" and capturing shapes within a broad form.

Many traditional artists consider "good draughtsmanship" a prerequisite for good painting, and I still try to follow Renoir's maxim, "Draw every day, even if it is something as simple as an apple. One can so easily lose the knack." At the same time, I've tried to  develop my painting skills, holding to the counsel of one of my drawing teachers (and many others): "The best way to learn to paint is to paint." Some years ago, though, I decided I would benefit from a little more structure and analysis and began to keep a workbook.

As I plan each painting, I record my initial impulse, what I aim to achieve, and, as it moves along, the process I follow. When the painting is finished, I make a brief self-assessment.

One thing I've repeatedly come to recognize is that my love for drawing -- for the crisp line especially -- is something of an impediment to my development as a painter. Again and again, I've considered how to "lose the edges" and felt that there's a hurdle here I need to get by.

Recently, some things have begun to click. In the spirit of "When the pupil is ready, the teacher will come," I happened to come across references in three different art books to Heinrich Wölfflin, an early 20th-century art historian and author of Principles of Art History: The Problem of Style in Later Art (and if that sounds ponderous, it's far less so than the original title in German, Kunstgeschichtliche something-something-something).

Reading the book offered me several a-HA moments -- ones which I won't try to summarize here. The key point for me at this time in my development is that Wölfflin was the first to make the distinction in artistic styles between the "linear" approach (think Dϋrer and Holbein) and what's been translated into English as the "painterly" approach (think Rembrandt).

Closer to home, consider my light-hearted "Conversations" series of about a year ago. "Conversations - 1" is painterly:

"Conversations - 4" is linear:

Wölfflin doesn't judge one to be superior to the other -- though it's clear that this thorough, analytical German loves art and gets most excited when he talks about the painterly. His basic premise is that the earlier (historically) linear style relates to the "tactile" -- the eye can follow the line around edges and shapes; in contrast, the painterly begins to rely solely on the visual, as the eye alone must make sense of what it sees before it.

One of the artist/writer/teachers who led me to these useful concepts feels that artists have a natural tendency towards either the linear or the painterly. Certainly this seems to be so in my case, based on a whole lot of personal artistic history, painted evidence, and my strong likes and dislikes. (Has Facebook forever ruined these words for us?). After all, what could be more linear than my recent "A Question of Scale"? 

Still, I've been shown a way to work alongside, if not over, that hurdle, and I'm giving it a try right now with my current work-in-progress. Alas, I'd already planned a composition -- in fact, a whole series -- that shouts "Linear!" but that will be part of the thrill of the chase. Wölfflin talks about "painting in patches" rather than "painting in lines" -- and my little wipe-cloth, at least, is already filling up with some painterly evidence.

Have an ICE day!

This winter's fierce storms affecting friends in the East and Midwest have brought a blizzard of memories. Oddly enough, one chilling memory comes from my mid-1990s meltdown phase at the place where I'd loved working for 18 years, from the first season we arrived in Vancouver.

It was the era of so-called "re-engineering" and a gaggle of consultants, each with secret knives out for the others' backs, inflicted the Cult of the Team on our previously happy and well-managed workplace. As the company wordsmith (oh, how I hated that word -- especially in the verb form, "to wordsmith", always used so casually, as if it were a mechanical skill no more intellectually demanding than...oh, polishing silver maybe), I was tapped for the Information, Communication and Education team. I.C.E., get it? The Cult Manifesto luckily did not require that we come up with a song and dance routine, but each team had to have a motto. Trying to play along, I won rave reviews for, "Have an I.C.E. Day!" and became the official dispenser of ICE® chocolate bars, awarded to any eager beaver who sent us an "idea for consideration," no matter how hare-brained. The writing on the wall couldn't have been larger or more threatening, and the rest is personal history. With much angst, I bailed outtathere as soon as I could.

But for someone who grew up in snow country, there are much happier ice memories than that. Can children today still be as enthralled as we once were by frost pictures on winter windowpanes? Many years ago, I read about an art technique for reproducing these lacy landscapes by placing absorbent paper and a colouring agent in a shallow tray of water and freezing it. My success rate came nowhere near that of Jack (...Frost...), but yielded some vaguely promising bookmark-sized results, which I found in my recent studio revamp:

I'd tried the article's suggestion to place leaves in the shallow liquid, but this as close as I came to the nifty illustrations accompanying the text.

Well, why not try again? I first used some diluted acrylic paint as my colouring agent, with indifferent results:

Maybe ink would work better? Emptying the last of some waterproof India ink into a small tray, I had my best luck:

Well, ink seemed to be the answer but the only ink colour I had on hand was red. What the heck. With a salute to friends who survived the Polar Vortex and all the stress and emotion that must have gone along with it, I poured it on, with this result.

Pretty cool, eh?  But meanwhile, the best ice cube story of the season comes to me courtesy of my oldest friend's (AND a Polar Vortex survivor) remarkable food-and-fascinations blog -- scroll down in her New Year's post to see ice cube trays like you've never seen before.

Santa will find us

Our second holiday in our new home, and we know for sure Santa will find us this year.  He won't have to follow the neighbourhood cats' tracks to our basement door.

He won't have to trace the aroma of Snow Loaves on our next-door neighbours'  bakery assembly.

No doubt, he'll remember our distinctive ever-leaved oak tree (even though the snow has melted now.)

When he reaches our chimney, he'll have no fear of flames below...

...because as much as we appreciate the heat of our electric fireplace, this weird moulded plastic is so darned hokey that we've disconnected the Log Function, and luckily the "fireplace screen" is dark enough to hide it from view.

He'll know he's found us when he checks out the mantel (make that pseudo-mantel) and discovers four awesome socks, handcrafted and special-delivered by our Bellingham artisan friend who combines the inspiration of 60s-style tie-dye with environmentally sustainable bamboo fabric!

Let it snow! -- and Happy New Year.

Another day dawns on The Colourful Past

A few months ago, I introduced my plan to occasionally turn out a painting in a proposed series, "The Colourful Past." My goals are to put my fascination with old architecture into paintings, to work in a semi-abstract manner, and to be adventurous with colour.

I've just completed the second in the series which yielded, along the way, many serendipitous moments, in the vein of the phenomenon outlined by one of my most important "virtual teachers", Mary Beth McKenzie:--

While an initial concept is important, you must allow a painting to take its own course. It will grow in stages and each stage, or your reaction to it, influences the next. A painting has its own existence and reality, and you have to follow its needs, making changes freely. Often these changes take you in another direction, opening up new possibilities that are sometimes more interesting than your original idea. You have to allow a painting to evolve.   (- from A PAINTERLY APPROACH, Mary Beth McKenzie)

My initial concept was based on the similarity of three neighbouring houses just around the corner from our IGA. Each of the three adjacent houses has a curious 4-windowed eave in the front of the roof, and I've been fascinated by this set of triple triangles.

The same hand -- or like-minded neighbours -- must have been responsible for transforming these boxy old homes into carefully maintained minor showpieces, painted in what might seem to be improbable colours. I've wondered if these colours were inspired by Vancouver's "True Colours"  program, which promotes heritage house paint colours. The city partnered with a commercial paint manufacturer that produces commercial house paints to match the colours of paint chips and fragments that a heritage advocate painstakingly scraped, layer upon layer, from old buildings.

I set to work on my layout, finding that a Purdy's Hedgehog box made a perfect template for the triangles.

This was a rather nice heritage synchronicity since Purdy's Chocolates is one of Vancouver's oldest purveyors of fine yummy stuff!

Working along (with occasional thoughts of those Hedgehogs -- but the box was empty!), I got as far as replicating the houses' fascinating colour schemes. Originally I'd thought that this, along with a textured background that lightened from bottom to top, would be enough.

But something, or maybe a lot of somethings, was lacking. Hmmm. Those fascinating window panes. What would they reflect in reality? It was here that the painting began to take on a life of its own. Spending time with my own reflections, I remembered a quick sketch I'd made in late summer of the colours of the dawn sky.

The three houses face east. Why not let them capture this reflection, with sky colours similar to the house colours?

Trying for a somewhat "realistic" treatment of the reflection travelling along each triangle's four panes, I was struck one morning by a happy synchronicity with the cocoa-brown of the lowest triangle: the conclusion to one of the great poems of one of my favourite poets, Gerard Manley Hopkins. (I've always chosen to view -- and read -- him as a pantheist rather than the Jesuit that he was.)

Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can feet feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings

With the series of four panes full of reflections, I took one more step, perhaps a risky one. With thoughts of those bright wings, I decided to place the dawn sky -- the sky that would evoke the reflections -- in the background. The day I made this decision, I concluded my early morning studio hour and went outside to put out the trash barrel. There above me was a confirmation (as I chose to see it) that my risk was worth it -- a stunning rosy-fingered dawn of the kind JT and I enjoyed through all the clear days of November.

Here's the final painting "Dawn: Three Neighbours on Quebec Street" (with its evolution here) 

I'm starting to plan and prepare paper for the next in the series, as well as for my next still life. Another day dawns in the studio...

...and I couldn't resist one more plunge into these colours -- taken November 25/2013 with the last quarter moon just visible in the upper right quadrant.)